The greater hope

The novel The Greater Hope by Ilse Aichinger was published in Amsterdam in 1948 by Bermann- Fischer-Verlag . At the center of the story are the experiences of the loss of the protagonist Ellen (loss of her mother, friends and grandmother through flight, deportation and suicide to avoid deportation). Experiences of persecution, attempted escape and living in an authoritarian system are also told. The book is considered to be the "hour of birth of Austrian post-war literature". The text remained the author's only novel.

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Cover of The Greater Hope , 1991 edition, based on the design by Otl Aicher , who also developed the special typography for most of Aichinger's books

Fischer-Verlag advertises the book as a “novel about racially persecuted children during the Hitler era”. He tells “of the fear, of the threat and the resistive hope of the 'children with the wrong grandparents'. These children, who are Jewish or - like the main character Ellen - are considered half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, suffer from isolation, humiliation and mockery. ”In the book itself, the concrete historical location in National Socialist Vienna is not named, which makes it not limited to this time. Aichinger himself said in a conversation that it should be “a report about how it really was”.

The book consists of ten not numbered chapters:

• The great hope
• The quay
• The holy land
• In the service of a foreign power
• The fear of fear
• The big game
• Grandmother's death
• Grand dream
• Do not be surprised
• The greater hope

The chapter “The Holy Land” is a further development of the text “The fourth gate” published by Aichinger on September 1, 1945 in the Wiener Kurier . The date of publication is important because the Second World War begins on September 1, 1939 and, from September 1, 1941, Jews are forced to wear the yellow Star of David with the inscription "Jew".

Aichinger revised the book, first published in 1948, for a new edition in 1960 as a paperback.

Web links

• Literature by and about The Greater Hope (Version 1960) in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature from and about The Greater Hope (Version 1948) in the catalog of the German National Library
• Reading from The Greater Hope by Ilse Aichinger from 1965 in the Austrian media library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Weigel: It started with Ilse Aichinger. Fragmentary memories of the hours of rebirth in Austrian literature after 1945 . In: Otto Breicha, Gerhard Fritsch (eds.): Call for mistrust , Salzburg 1967, pp. 3–4; and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler: Foreword . In: Nicole Rosenberger : Poetics of the unmoved. On the portrayal of war and persecution in Ilse Aichinger's novel “The Greater Hope” , Vienna 1998.
2. ↑ See the blurb or online at Fischer-Verlag .
3. ↑ Aichinger, Ilse quoted. n. Richard Reichensperger in "The Greater Hope", Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 285.
4. ↑ Cf. Reichensperger, Richard in "The Greater Hope", Fischer: Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 271.
5. ↑ Cf. Reichensperger, Richard in “The Greater Hope”, Fischer: Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 271. For a comparison of the versions, see Norbert Bachleitner: Preliminary remarks to: Focus: The translations of Ilse Aichinger's The Greater Hope . In: International Archive for the Social History of German Literature , 37, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 138-139.